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Young Bulgarians Know Their Nation's History, Sort Of

15.11.2004

Explores the knowledge of Bulgarian youths in relation to their country's history. Unawareness of the Communism era; Outlook of some education officials on the need for teaching young students about the Communism era to students; Preference of some families not to talk on the darker side of Communism.

SOFIA, Bulgaria - In the heart of Sofia, streets that were empty a decade ago are packed with cars - sleek Mercedes-Benzes and BMW's, and Opels, Volkswagens and Fords for families. Young people gather in modern cafes and bars. Restaurants are booming. Teenagers have grown up with MTV, and follow Western fashions.
Bulgaria is already a member of NATO and expects to join the European Union in just over a year. With that in mind, attention is firmly focused on Western-style economic reforms and the progress toward prosperity that the country has made in recent years.
Young Bulgarians enjoying material progress seem to be increasingly unaware of what preceded it, the years of Communism and their darker side.
"I can't say much about'' the Communist era, said Vessela Peneva, 20, a journalism and communications studies student at Sofia University. "I don't know whether it was good or bad."
Yana Lazarova, 17, looked up at a tall monument here in the center of Liberty Park featuring three muscular figures, one clutching a gun, all carved of black stone. But what did it honor, exactly? She admitted she did not know. After a while, she guessed, "It's a monument to the Soviet Army for liberating Bulgaria from the Turks in 1878," speaking with wild inaccuracy.
Not long ago, her answer would have elicited a rebuke. The statues are indeed part of Sofia's monument to the Soviet Army, which has nothing to do with the Turks. Instead, the monument commemorates the Soviet liberation of Bulgaria from the Nazis in 1944, an event that paved the way for 45 years of Communist rule.
It is a fact that every schoolchild in this former Eastern European bloc state used to know. But 15 years after the collapse of Communism, many students of Ms. Lazarova's generation have grown up with only the vaguest notion of their country's recent past.
They were barely able to walk when Bulgaria's hard-line leader, Todor Zhivkov, was removed from power on Nov. 10, 1989, the day after the Berlin Wall was breached. Since then, Bulgaria's postwar history has been glossed over in high schools, teenagers say, as the country concentrates on the future.
One of Ms. Peneva's teachers, Matthew Brunwasser, 33, a visiting journalism instructor from San Francisco, said her view was typical.
When he recently mentioned Bulgaria's infamous state security service, the Durzhavna Sigurnost, which was behind numerous foreign assassinations and ran an extensive network of informants inside the country, he said his students had to go home and look it up on the Internet.
One problem, according to educational officials and others, is that while most 16-year-olds should study that period, history books have yet to be updated, and schools are no longer officially using the Marxist texts of the Communist era. That means that the lessons are often left to the discretion of teachers, who are guided by the bare-bones view going back to the Nazis, that Bulgaria was ruled by a totalitarian regime, one that was gradually replaced by a more authoritarian one, which then collapsed after the Berlin Wall fell.
Education officials say some schools do a good job of teaching about the period, while others are weak.
"You can say that the period of socialism is downplayed in the history textbooks," said Vesselin Metodiyev, who served as education minister in the country's first post-Communist government. "Bulgarian historiography was an ideological discipline. Non-Marxist historians have only recently been able to begin studying the historical record."
At home, too, Mr. Brunwasser said he believed that many families preferred not to talk about the darker side of Communism.
"Parents don't want to burden their children," said Mr. Brunwasser, who has been living in Bulgaria on and off since 1995. "Some families do, especially those members who suffered particularly, but in general they just don't talk about it."
Bulgaria is unusual in the region in this respect, said Mr. Brunwasser, who is at work on a book on Bulgaria's post-Communist generation. "There was no organized opposition to Communists in Bulgaria," he said, drawing a distinction from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where a struggle against Communism formed part of their national identities.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/international/europe/15sofia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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